President Eisenhower used Penn State's centennial commencement — and the university's new atomic research reactor — as the occasion to announce two major nuclear policy proposals. But beneath the policy announcements was a philosophical argument about education and peace that transcended the Cold War specifics. Eisenhower argued that the divisions between nations were 'artificial and transient' while 'our common humanity is God-made and enduring.' The enemy was not the Soviet people but ignorance itself. 'If we are to have partners for peace, then we must first be partners in sympathetic recognition that all mankind possesses in common like aspirations and hungers, like ideals and appetites, like purposes and frailties, a like demand for economic advancement.' Coming from the Supreme Allied Commander who had defeated Nazi Germany, this insistence on common humanity carried particular moral authority.